Time To Raise Alarm On The Future Of Food

Americans are aware. A majority, including both Republicans and Democrats, say they are trying to reduce their meat and dairy consumption. Still, inflation is high, systems are stubborn and tastes are hard to change.

So scientists have been searching for solutions, ones that will make protein-rich food cheap, accessible and far more sustainable. The good news? They already have answers. The problem, they say, is scaling them.

The protein problem

People need protein for balanced, healthy diets. But that’s become a problem for the planet.

“We get most of our protein-rich and fat-rich foods from animal farming,” George Monbiot, an ecologist and journalist, said in a phone interview this week. “And animal farming is arguably the most destructive of all industries on Earth.”

He added that the industry as a whole is “the primary cause of habitat destruction, wildlife loss, extinction, land use, soil degradation, water use and one of the major causes of climate breakdown.”

That’s changed. Today, popular plant-based alternatives, like those from Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, appear on menus of restaurants around the country, from Panda Express to Long John Silver’s. Seventy-one percent of Americans have tried a plant-based burger or other meat alternatives. Demand for alternatives to dairy has been growing, too. Now, almond, oat and other nondairy products make up 14 percent of milk sales in grocery stores.

But even if protein is available in other forms, Americans aren’t converted. In a 2018 Gallup poll, only 5 percent said they were vegetarians. The majority of the country has high fidelity to meat and dairy products — a taste that has long been difficult to replicate with plants.

“To put it simply, plants are crunchy, and meat is chewy. This is why veggie burgers can often feel crumbly or mushy in texture, without the bite and springiness of animal protein,” the chef J. Kenji López-Alt wrotefor The Times. He added that “animal fat, which provides mouth-coating richness and juiciness,” is also difficult to replicate with plant-based fats.

But researchers have been working on a solution — one that can replicate the those nutrients, tastes and textures without using animals.

A fermented future?

Fermentation, essential for making sourdough bread, beer and cheese, has been around for centuries. But advances in the science of fermentation are helping researchers decouple animals from the proteins they produce.

Specifically, “precision fermentation” is helping food scientists grow ingredients found in animal products without the need for a traditional farm. Instead, the scientists isolate the specific ingredients, then multiply their cells in brewery-style tanks. The result? Animal-free eggs, milk and meat that are biologically similar to animal products.

Recent innovations in precision fermentation are allowing scientists to replicate, for example, “the exact fatty acid” that makes meat taste like meat, said Liz Specht, who oversees a research team focused on the future of alternative protein at the Good Food Institute. Experts say these developments will help close the gap between plant-based products and their animal-derived analogues, making them nearly indistinguishable in taste and texture.

“It’s a tool in the tool kit to get these plant-based products over those next few hurdles, from a sensory perspective and from a cost-reduction perspective,” she added. “This is very, very different than what was happening in the protein space, say, five years ago.”

These products, alongside lab-cultivated meat, could appeal to flexitarians or to occasional consumers of plant-based products who haven’t been sold on the taste so far, enabling more consumption of meat alternatives.

And that little bit could make all the difference, scientists say.

A recent study in Nature found that replacing just 20 percent of global beef consumption and other grazing livestock with “microbial proteins,” or those made from fermentation, could cut annual deforestation in half by 2050. (Whether the plant-based foods, many of which are highly processed, are healthier is subject to debate.)

“Replacing the milk, meat and, one day, even the eggs that we eat would massively take pressure off the planet,” Mr. Monbiot said. “It could also develop a whole new cuisine that we can’t even imagine at the moment. Just as the first farmers to capture a wild cow weren’t thinking about Camembert.”

Scaling up

Enthusiasm for this innovation abounds. (“Precision fermentation is the most important environmental technology humanity has ever developed,” Mr. Monbiot said. “We would be idiots to turn our back on it.”)

Growth in this corner of the alternative-meat industry has largely been facilitated by private investment. And interest is booming: Alternative protein fermentation companies raised $1.7 billion in 2021, up 285 percent from 2020.

Still, start-ups working on innovating fermented foods are navigating “inherent inefficiencies,” Ms. Specht said. To succeed, and deliver a return for investors, they need to build new infrastructure and nurture talent in a food industry trained to support animal farming.

“They’re on a knife’s edge of profitability,” Ms. Specht added, while the companies also try to deliver products at a “price point within reach of most consumers.”

She argues that it’s a critical moment for governments to invest in “research and development and provide incentivizes for building out the industry’s infrastructure,” as many nations have invested in the renewable energy sector in recent years.

Without regulation and support, some worry the industry could one day be dominated by major agriculture companies, like Tyson, Smithfield, Perdue and Hormel, which have all rolled out meat alternatives in recent years.

“Monopoly and intellectual property is a genuine worry,” Mr. Monbiot said. “Ninety percent of the world’s grain passes through the hands of four corporations.”